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Outstanding Research Award

Award Info

Description

About the Award

The Outstanding Research Award highlights outstanding student research conducted by graduate student members of SPSP.

Submissions will be reviewed by student peers and/or faculty members. Five students will be chosen for the award and will receive a $100 honorarium. As an additional honor, all recipients will be offered the opportunity to meet with a mentor of their choice at the 2019 SPSP Annual Convention. All graduate students, whether pursuing dissertation or pre-dissertation research, are welcome to submit an application.

Selection Process

There will be one round of judging for this award. Five winners will be chosen by a group of reviewers based on the merits of the entire application. Reviewers will be matched to appropriate applications based on keyword matches and field of work. Applications will be reviewed blindly based on the judging rubric.

Eligibility

Applicants must be student members of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology at the time they apply for the award.

Applicants must be the first author of an accepted submission to SPSP (i.e., poster, single paper or paper in a symposium) that is not currently published or in-press. *Data collection/analysis must be completed.

Applicants must be a full-time graduate student at the time of submission.

Applicants are eligible to enter ONE first-author submission to the award. If more than one submission is entered, they will all be voided.

Applicants must plan to attend the 2019 SPSP convention in Portland, OR.

Please note: Past winners of the Student Poster Award and Student Travel Award are eligible for this award. However, past winners of the Outstanding Research Award are NOT eligible.

How to Apply

Submission Requirements

Applications should include a brief abstract and a project summary, both of which should be BLIND (should not include any identifying information, such as names and affiliations):

An abstract of 400 words or fewer summarizing the research. There is no minimum word limit for abstracts; however, we believe that abstracts that adequately describe the details of the research require at least 300 words.

A project summary limited to three pages. The summary should include the purpose of the research, a brief introduction, methods, results, and discussion/implications sections.

The introduction must include a clear, concise and completely justified statement of the hypotheses tested (if applicable) or the research questions.

The discussion/implications should discuss the significant contribution of the work.

The summary can include up to two tables or figures (i.e., one table/one figure, two tables, or two figures) that are not counted toward the three-page limit. References also do not count towards the three-page limit.

How to Submit

The 2019 awards submissions have ended. Submissions for the 2020 awards will open in September of 2019.

Past Recipients

2017

Laura Wallace is a PhD candidate in psychology at Ohio State University. Broadly speaking, her research focuses on the psychology of change. Within this broad theme, she focuses on three major questions: When do people seek growth for themselves and their societies? How and when do people’s attitudes change? When do attitudes lead to action? You can learn more about her here: http://laura-e-wallace.com/

David March is a PhD student in social psychology at the University of Tennessee. His research seeks to understand the implicit social cognitive mechanisms guiding how people process information. David has developed a theoretical model, the Dual Implicit Process Model, that explicates a speed and strength difference between the implicit processing of threats to immediate bodily harm versus all other classes of stimuli.

Jae Yun Kim is a PhD candidate in the Management and Organizations program at Duke University. His research primarily examines how popular ideas about self-help and self-improvement (e.g., women's empowerment messages, advice to pursue one's passion, the belief in the power of the mind and thinking) shape perceptions of fairness, inequality, and legitimacy.

Paige Lloyd was a PhD candidate at Miami University at the time of the award and is now an assistant professor at the University of Denver. She investigates the antecedents and consequences of person perception, with an emphasis on implications for social inequality.

David Newman is a Ph.D. candidate in social psychology at the University of Southern California. His research focuses primarily on understanding well-being in ecologically valid contexts. To examine within-person variations in well-being in daily life, he relies on daily diary and experience sampling techniques. The current paper concerns the relationship between nostalgia and well-being in daily life.

2016

Courtney Walsh is a third year doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin in the Human Development and Family Sciences department. Her research interests revolve around the daily experiences of romantic couples and the benefits of shared positivity. Other research interests include the bidirectional processes of romantic relationships and the self-concept, with a specific focus on self-expansion and self-concept clarity.

Gregg Sparkman is a PhD student at Stanford University studying dynamic norms: how information that others are changing can motivate personal change. He is interested in the intersections of motivation, social norms, identity and morality in domains related to sustainable behavior, collective action and social change.

Jennifer Dannals is a PhD candidate at Stanford Graduate School of Business studying Organizational Behavior. In addition to her research on social norms, Jennifer also researches other aspects of team dynamics, such as hierarchy, diversity and coordination.

Zoë Francis is currently completing her PhD at the University of Toronto. She has studied potential new ego depletion methodologies, and has investigated the interplay between individual differences and mental fatigue from behavioural, neuroscience, and theoretical perspectives.

Kassandra Cortes is a PhD student at the University of Waterloo. She examines the dynamics of interpersonal relationships using motivational and social cognitive frameworks.

Contact

For questions regarding this award, contact the Student Committee at spsp_gsc@spsp.org.

Join SPSP or Renew Membership

Membership in SPSP is open to students and those whose work focuses largely in social/personality psychology. Members receive discounts to the SPSP Convention, access to three journals, access to the SPSP Job Board, and much more.